Defining your quality initiatives

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Maxim Ivlev

Improving quality and efficiency in an organization can often seem like a difficult task, given the numerous approaches out there. Some companies believe their quality improvement initiatives are strong enough to withstand any obstacle in the marketplace, whereas other companies fail to have a strong enough stance on the subject entirely. This can be as a direct result of poor leadership and accountability, cultural resistance, and even poor planning.

In a recent article posted on QualityDigest.com, George Maszle summaries an excellent input-process-output (IPO) chart, called Quality and Productivity Improvement Processes, focusing on 10 positive factors that can be implemented in the workforce for a more productive and value-based development. Some of these factors include selecting the right people and projects, integrated training, and enterprise-wide knowledge training, to name a few.

Once these elements are executed across the board, they create five desired quality outputs as a result, which are: Improved value for customers, shareholders and society; improved intellectual capital; top line growth, bottom line growth; and positive cultural change. Based on these five performance measures, many organizations who implemented this formula, according to Maszle, achieved moderate results with certain inputs, while other inputs resulted in significant success.

Every organization is unique in its own way, resulting in different values, cultures, responsibilities, and ultimately different goal setting. Finding a sustainable quality formula that suits your organizational goals will help define positive characteristics within your company and bring you success moving forward.

Improvement: To be Continual… Or Continuous?

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Any student of W. Edwards Deming or quality management in general is no stranger to the term ‘Continuous Improvement’.

Over here at Intelex, we use the term an awful lot, as we believe that, though it is most frequently cited in conversations on quality management, it is more of a meta-process that can be applied to all aspects of business management: environment, health, safety, governance…anything!

But a bit of an internal conversation was struck up recently as we noticed some people prefer ‘continuous’, while others use ‘continual’. So we thought we would do a little research and find out which term was correct, or if they represented two ways of stating the same thing.

Here’s a comparison chart outlining what we found (with an albeit highly unscientific methodology):

Metric	Continual	Continuous
Definition	“Recurring regularly or frequently”	“Forming an unbroken whole; without interruption”
Google Pickup	About 1.2 million results	About 9.5 million results
Wikipedia Search Result	Redirects to “Continuous Improvement Process”	“Continuous Improvement Process”

So, it’s clear “Continuous Improvement” is far more widely used, and more accurately describes the premise.

But as Jon Miller points out in this blog post on the topic, “continual improvement” – that is, improvement in stages and marked by interruption – is a better description of what businesses actually practice. Even the Plan-Do-Check-Act approach, endemic of most management systems wherein continuous improvement is a central premise, is itself an iterative process, signified by stages and interruptions.

On the other hand, ”continuous improvement” is a better description of what businesses ought to aspire to achieve. Is it possible? I believe so. I believe that when technology is leveraged, when real-time data is communicated seamlessly to operators, when trending and forecasting tools enable truly predictive, proactive management, then continuous improvement – in the true sense of the term – is achieved, or at least lies within reach.

Cultivating curiosity: continuous improvement in training management

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Many businesses make the mistake of approaching training as a one-time or ad hoc responsibility: employees are trained when they are hired and rarely, if ever, retrained or trained for new competencies.
Businesses cannot adequately embrace the much sought-after ideal of continual improvement until they incorporate continuous training into their business models.

It is essential to establish a training program that helps every employee realize their potential, and in turn helps the business realize its potential. Such programs should be constantly revisited and always altered due to employee, manager and customer feedback. It should be a continuous process.

One aspect of continuous training should be a program that regularly schedules learning sessions with employees to build, develop and diversify their skills and knowhow as they grow with the company.

No discussion of continuous improvement would be complete without reference to W. Edward Deming, the man responsible for quality control and its most critical mechanism, the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle or Deming cycle. Not only can the Deming cycle be applied to training and training management programs to mitigate negative impacts on quality; the famous statistician’s focus on curbing the role of checklists and giving all employees a sense of meaning behind their responsibilities can be applied to achieve integrated training.

It’s the cultivation of the “curious” side of an employee, and it is achieved by using Deming’s model to get employees to think beyond their immediate jobs. For example, if you’re operating a press, you probably retain a lot of knowhow beyond just press operation. That is, you probably have a better sense of how to better the quality of a product or the experience of a customer.

But it can be very difficult – in large organizations, especially – to incorporate continuous improvement into training programs without the right tools to streamline training management and ensure employee competence.